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Somewhere in Sagamihara there is a building kept at between two and ten degrees, at thirty five to forty percent humidity, twenty four hours a day, and inside it are ninety thousand eight hundred and seventy five reels. On Wednesday night at eleven o’clock, the people who run that building finished raising the money to keep the air conditioning on.
The National Film Archive of Japan spent the summer crowdfunding. Not for a restoration, not for a title, not for a project with a poster and a premiere. For its operating budget. The campaign closed on the twenty third with a little over 154 million yen from 5,522 people, against a first goal of 100 million that it passed in the middle of August.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ‘Days and Nights in the Forest,’ ‘Sons of Anarchy’ (PM Weekly Issue #12)Here is the part that makes it worth the top of this column. Nobody cut the archive’s budget. The Agency for Cultural Affairs said so publicly, and it is right. The grant to the archive’s parent body, the National Museum of Art, went up this year by around 320 million yen, to 8.46 billion. What happened is that the parent body rebalanced its allocations across its seven museums, and the archive’s share of that grant fell to 358.56 million yen from 682.92 million two years ago. The rebalancing follows a target requiring these institutions to cover more of their costs from their own earnings.
That target is reasonable if you run a museum. A museum has a front door, a ticket, a gift shop and an exhibition that people queue for. An archive’s core work has none of those things, because an archive’s core work is that nothing happens. Film sits in the dark a few degrees above freezing and does not decay, and there is no version of that which shows up as revenue. The archive’s fixed costs alone, the power and the building and the fixed-term staff, came to 441.72 million yen. Its allocation was 358.56 million. The gap is not a funding crisis in the dramatic sense. It is an accounting definition, applied evenly, landing on the one institution in the group whose product is an absence.
The archive has never once called it a cut. Its own language is “diversifying and expanding income.” Its director, Akira Tochigi, put the question and answered it himself on the campaign page: why is the National Film Archive doing this? The answer is clear, he wrote, because continuing stable activity requires diversifying and expanding income. That is an institution being careful about who it blames, which tells you something about what it costs to say the other thing.
It has crowdfunded once before, in 2021, for a defined project: digitising a hundred and ten magnetic tapes of a filmmakers’ interview series. It raised five and a half million yen. This time it asked strangers for the electricity bill and got thirty times as much. The only real precedent in Japan is the National Museum of Nature and Science, which went to the public in 2023 over its heating and lighting and came back with about 920 million yen from roughly fifty seven thousand people.
Count what those ninety thousand elements are for a moment. That number is not ninety thousand films, because one film can exist as a negative and a fine grain and three prints of varying completeness, and the archive is careful to say so. It is the raw material. It is what a restoration starts from and what a Criterion or an Arrow or a Radiance disc of a Japanese title eventually traces back to, two or three licences down the chain. Around nine in ten Japanese films made before the war are believed to be gone already. The ones that are not are in rooms like that one, and the rooms cost money whether or not anybody is looking.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
This Week on Disc
- Forbidden Planet (1956), 4K UHD and Blu-ray Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Go (1999), 4K UHD Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Criterion
- Three Films by Leos Carax, 4K UHD and Blu-ray collector’s set, Criterion
- Dead Poets Society (1989), 4K UHD, Touchstone
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), 4K UHD, 20th Century Studios
- Frankenstein: The Complete Legacy Collection, eight films on 4K UHD, Universal
- The Wolf Man: The Complete Legacy Collection, seven films on 4K UHD, Universal
- Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Bullet in the Head (1990), 4K UHD Limited Edition SteelBook, Shout! Studios
- Anthropophagous (1980), three-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
- Absurd (1981), two-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
Market Signal
Paramount settled on Sunday. Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild had been suing to block its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a trial was set for March, and the whole thing has now been resolved by agreement instead.
The terms are about supply. Paramount commits to thirty theatrical films a year for two years and thirty two a year for three after that, at least four of them independent, plus an additional three hundred million dollars a year of American production spending over five years and nine and a half million a year on workforce training. There are editorial independence boards at CBS News and CNN. There are no divestitures. Nothing is being sold off to anybody.
The demand that this column has been circling since Issue #9, that the states and the guild post a bond of 1.88 billion dollars before being allowed to keep suing, died in the same filing. The parties jointly asked the court to take Thursday’s hearing off the calendar and the judge did. It was never ruled on. It was a lever, it worked, and it went away with the thing it was levering. The consent decree itself has not yet been approved, so nobody should write that this deal is finished, but the ticking fees Paramount owes Warner shareholders start at seven million dollars a day on the first of October and the chief executive has told staff he expects to close in about two weeks.
Now read the terms again for what is not in them. Warner and Paramount hold the two libraries that most of the 4K catalogue market runs on, and most boutique licensing besides. Arrow, Criterion, Shout, Vinegar Syndrome’s Iconoscope, all of them are licensing against one or both. The settlement obligates how many films get made and where the money is spent making them. It says nothing about catalogue licensing, nothing about physical output, nothing about preservation, nothing about what happens to two vaults becoming one. That is not an oversight and it is not a scandal. It is that the people at the table were arguing about production and jobs, which are the things antitrust law is comfortable arguing about. What is in the buildings was never a subject anyone was required to raise.
Store of the Week
We Luv Video (Austin, TX)
The store at 100 East North Loop Boulevard holds roughly a hundred and thirty thousand tapes and discs, and almost none of it was bought new.
I Luv Video ran in Austin from 1984 and at its height had five locations. It closed in September 2020, in the part of the pandemic when a lot of things closed and nobody pretended there was a plan. Conrad Bejarano, who founded it, has said the obvious thing about that: when the doors are shuttered, what other option is there. What made this different from every other store that went that year is what happened to the shelves. The collection did not get auctioned off in lots or sold to a liquidator. It went into storage, and in July 2023 a good deal of it came back out.
We Luv Video is a registered nonprofit, run by volunteers, started by Macy Cotton and her husband Ryan Teel. Membership is ten dollars a month, five for students. It opens six to ten Monday through Thursday, four until midnight on Friday, and noon until midnight at the weekend, which is a schedule written by people who understand that a video store is an evening business. It runs as a microcinema too, with screenings and tape swaps. Its motto is that the revolution will not be streamed. Bejarano is still adding stock out of storage, which means the collection is still growing three years after the store that built it closed.
The detail that gets me is the one Cotton mentions. There is so much weird stuff in there, she has said, and a lot of the cases still have I Luv Video’s own staff notes inside them, which they have kept. Somebody who worked a counter in Austin in 1994 wrote something on a card about a film, and the card is still in the box, and it is in the box because a volunteer decided not to throw it away.
CineFile last week survived because one man who already owned a shop on that street decided a second one was not going to close. We Luv Video is the other case entirely. The store did close. It closed completely and it is not coming back. What survived was the collection, and what saved it was a nonprofit and a rota of volunteers, which is the same answer Japan arrived at this week at a hundred times the scale. When there is no business model for keeping something, what is left is people agreeing to keep it anyway.
(Next week: Facets in Chicago, founded in 1975, which has been lending films since the video era and treats a rental counter as a public library.)
The Stack
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Sons of Anarchy: Season One (2009)
Format: DVD, 4 Discs
Bonus Features: audio commentaries on “Pilot,” “The Pull” and “The Revelator”; 35 minutes of deleted, extended and alternate scenes; “The Making of Sons of Anarchy Season One”; “The Ink”; “The Bikes”; “Casting Sons of Anarchy”; and a gag reel, “Anarchy on the Set”
Fox put this out on the eighteenth of August 2009, four discs, thirteen episodes ($49.98).
Every one of those episodes is currently on Hulu and on Disney+. You can be watching the pilot in about nine seconds. You can also buy the season digitally for fourteen ninety nine, which is cheaper than the disc was and cheaper than the disc is now.
None of those places has the commentaries. Kurt Sutter sits down on the pilot with Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Katey Sagal. He does “The Pull” with the director Guy Ferland, Hunnam and Maggie Siff. Then he does “The Revelator,” the season finale, with most of the cast in the room at once, and by every account of it that I have read it degenerates in the way those things do when nobody has anything left to promote. That is three hours of the people who made the thing talking about making it, recorded in 2009, and it exists on a disc and on nothing else. Hulu does have an Extras tab for the show. What is in it is promotional material made for the series finale in 2014. Not one item from this set is on it. Disney+ lists no extras at all.
There is a second difference and I want to be careful about it, because I can only prove part of it. The discs carry extended, uncensored cuts of the episodes and the streaming versions are the broadcast cuts. That is documented properly for season three, where somebody has gone through an episode shot by shot and found nearly six minutes of difference. I have not found an equivalent comparison for season one, so I will say only that the disc and the stream are not the same edit of this show and leave the exact figure for the season alone.
And the set is effectively gone. Best Buy lists it as no longer available new. Walmart has one, from a marketplace seller. Nobody is manufacturing it, because why would they, when the show is right there and doing fine.
This is the same shape as the story at the top of the issue, at the smallest possible scale. The film is safe. The show is safe. The record of how it was made is on four discs in my house and in a couple of thousand others, and there is no line item anywhere that pays for it to be anywhere else.
Sign-Off
That is Issue #12. A national archive raising its own electricity money from strangers because the accounting says a vault should earn its keep, a merger settling on everything except what happens to the vaults, a hundred and thirty thousand tapes in Austin kept alive by volunteers and a store that no longer exists, and three hours of commentary that only a 2009 DVD still has. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one.
See you Friday.
PM Weekly
Sean Reid
Film & TV Production
seanreid@worldonetv.com
